Knowing .NET

Free Tools for the New Scientific Revolution « Shepherd’s Pi.

Some fun tools from Microsoft for playing with Big Data.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com.

Good article on a question that is always of interest in programming language circles. The modern take, apparently, is ““Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”

The obvious example would be that in explicitly-typed languages, you always have to convey information on what types your functions expect and return:

int plus(int a1, int a2);

while in an implicitly typed language, you don’t:

def plus(a1, a2)

Another example is that in Ruby, if you want to access an instance variable, you use the ‘@’ symbol: @my_instance_variable, as opposed to languages such as Java and C#, where instance variables are not necessarily distinguishable from local variables. Because that’s often a valuable thing to know, one often finds coding standards: naming instance variables with _foo or mFoo or always referring to them as this.foo or what-have-you.

Presumably, the upshot of this is that you ought to seek a language in which you must convey the things that you think are universally important.

I hope this bodes well for a job I’m interviewing for this week…

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• Disk Utility cannot fix my Mac boot drive. Time to find out how good Time Machine is… #
• Looks like my Mac crashes were due to the RAM boards having worked loose. Lost a day’s work and another day fixing it, but all-in-all happy #
• The Sounds of Sorting http://bit.ly/acQMT2 #
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• Beta testers wanted: Shoredive Hawai’i iPhone / iPad app. DM or email to lobrien@knowing.net. Please retweet! #
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• I grant you that it’s opinionated, but YAGNI http://www.worldcarfans.com/110081727946/pagani-zonda-hh-owner-revealed #

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• Holy crap! 2 weeks I’m on vacation and someone proves P != NP? http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/ #
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• For those interested in tracking the P != NP debate, I suggest http://rjlipton.wordpress.com for commentary #
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• Looking at Venus, mercury, mars, Saturn, moon. Having a Mai Tai with friends. No ka oi. #

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I’m not sure that this one will break into the public consciousness, but Vinay Deolalikar of HP may have proved one of the major challenges in complexity theory, that P != NP. In addition to being a great intellectual success, this particular problem has very big practical implications. Luckily, though, what may have been proved is what was widely suspected to be true, so the upshot is that, if the proof is correct, the worlds of digital commerce and cryptography will breathe a sigh of relief.

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• Realized those staring in airport mistook my kite bag for a rifle case. Stand down, folks, nothing but nylon and string #

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• United airlines phone-based support for missing bags: blatant lies by policy or personal initiative? Sachim Malik and others. #ual #
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• At Muddy Buddy Chicago. Sitting in air conditioned Lincoln Town Car. Shaking my fist at young whippersnappers. #

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